George Best (59 years) died this Friday of a pulmonary infection. Alcohol will have killed it. With the following day, ironic coincidence, opening No limit of the British pubs up to that point held not to be used more as alcohol after 22. 50. Friday morning, professor Roger Williams, who dealt with the former footballer of Manchester United at the Cromwell hospital of London, had declared: "When I rose, I expected that it is said to me that he had died during the night. It is very surprising, but it is a man strapping man with many regards."

A man strapping man who will constantly have tried the devil: even its clerk's office of the liver, in 2002, had not been right of its passion for alcohol. The operation had required a ten hours operation. It had been necessary to transfuse twenty liters of blood to him - i.e. 40 half-litres, therefore as many pints. Comment of the interested one: "Ten hours for forty pints, I beat my record of ten minutes." One of its former fellow-members, in the English press: "the problem, it is that George always had all too easily: the pace, the charm, the talent, the girls... and even, hold, its liver."

Best was born on May 22, 1946 in Belfast, in Northern Ireland. He, with him all alone, makes rock the foot in another thing. It does not play for Manchester, but beside the ten others. Danny Blanchflower, one of its biographers, was one of most precise on the business: "Best titillated the directions. Its movements were faster, more luminous, lighter than those of the others. Its range at the same time was refined and more unexpected. In addition to that, it behaved as if it neglected the physical danger. It had ice in the veins, of fire in the heart, synchronization and balance in the feet."

In England of the Sixties, the impact is phenomenal. Even those which foutent balloon come to see playing "Belfast servant boy" - then, very quickly, "El Beatle", because its reputation is equalizes it of that of the four others. At 20 years, Best gains 160 pounds per week (an enormous sum for the time), it has a particular secretary and one declads (rouflaquettes, a pace of skinned cat) to burst, it rolls in standard Jaguar E And it emmerde the whole ground. Over the twenty-four hours previous a match: "It is death. I know that I should not put a foot downtown and to lie down at 23 hours. But that returns nutcase to me. I do not like to read. Finally if, the Sports pages. The only thing which enables me to hold the shock, it is the prospect for a festival saturdays after the match. Then of another Monday. And also Tuesday."

The foot connected over its time. In 26 years, too concerned, Best announces its retirement: it is a little the Netherlander Johan Cruyff who will take again the torch, self-destroying, more general as a head. With its manner, Best does not release however the bar: foireux come-back in Scotland or California, poses chest-hair with the mother and the girl in the same pile, cooked over five days. And a high conscience of what it can "sell" (it leaves a bio per annum) with an English press which never released it: "I spent much of money in drink, the girls and the sports cars. And the remainder, I wasted it."

It will spend most clearly the Eighties and Nineties to Phenes, a London pub on King' S Road. Vodka in the orange juice of the morning, held up in the coffee of the evening. "As I was it on the ground, it was necessary that I would be the best downtown." It contracts a marriage express train in the middle of the Nineties with his second wife, Alex. She said of him: "It seemed to carry out a mission of self-destruction."